Like a Horse and Carriage

Like most of our holidays, Valentine's Day has a history that reportedly starts with those horny pagans and another one of their many fertility festivals, makes its way to the Catholic Church, which, in a typical cooption, laid on top its own celebration and gave it a fancy new saint-name, winds its way through the work of a popular British author (no, not that guy for a change, but this guy) who gifted its association with romantic love, and ended up mercilessly corrupted by soulless corporations who want to Sell You Shit Without Which You Can't Possibly Celebrate This Holiday.

Ya know. Kinda like Easter. Or Christmas.

Its origins being murky at best, there are competing legends about the sainted man for whom Valentine's Day is named, each of which has emerged to fill a need in its time, like such things have a wont to do. The account I like best, though, casts St. Valentine as a priest who defied a decree of the Roman Emperor Claudius II forbidding soldiers from getting married on the premise that such emotional attachments weakened soldiers' resolve. Valentine, moved by the injustice of the edict, met young lovers in secret and held clandestine weddings despite the prohibition—an acknowledgement of the (nearly) universal desire to love and be loved and commit to another, for which he was eventually jailed and executed.

I like the idea, even if it's only that and nothing more, that Valentine's Day is not just about love, but about marriage equality.

Love is a concept that is largely absent from our modern debates about marriage equality—because, of course, the people who seek to deny marriage to same-sex couples lose ground when the emotions of the thing impose upon their clinical, passionless talking points about protecting an institution they'd happily return to little more than a property exchange between landowning men, given half a chance.

For a very long time, marriage between a man and a woman didn't have a lot to do with romantic love. (In fact, in some traditions, it still doesn't.) One of the most remarkable things about US culture is that we have the freedom to partner for love, to forge lifelong bonds based not on class or race or religion or the number of goats our dads can spare, but on a feeling so beautiful that poets have spent lifetimes trying to lay it on a page, that artists have passionately sought its capture in one still but enduring moment. Operas and books and films and pop songs, so heartbreakingly lovely that they can steal one's breath, if just for a moment, have been written by people in the thralls of love, or the searing pain of its loss. Monuments have been built, wars have been fought, and some of the greatest happiness ever experienced by humankind has been born because of love.

We are blessed with the luxury of romantic love, and, make no mistake, it is a luxury.

We are also blessed with the luxury of choosing to have nothing to do with romantic love, or the institutions of its association, if that is our wish.

But, even if we wish nothing more than to take part in those institutions, some of us nonetheless continue to be denied equal access, based on whom it is that we love. Marriage remains, in most of the US and much of the rest of the world, a privilege, denied to same-sex couples by people invoking gods of various names (Jesus, Mohammed, Tradition) as thin veneers to lay atop the desperate insecurity about their super-special relationships losing the shimmering, golden glow that only denying equality to same-sex couples conveys upon their gloriously gilded unions.

To throw wide the doors of marriage to same-sex couples (or—gasp!—poly relationships) is to undermine its value, they argue.

But marriage at its best is an expression of love. When it's simply an institution to facilitate the continued existence of a society through the birth of new generations, it is a splendid functional legal contract and nothing more. When it's a sign of commitment forged out of love, it is something ever so much grander. It is evidence of consent, autonomy, respect, dignity. It is evidence of love.

The value of any individual marriage is determined exclusively by the people joined by the union, but the value of marriage as an institution is diminished because we refuse to open access to all loving people. People marry for convenience, for access to healthcare, for immigration purposes, for all manner of practical reasons (as well they should be allowed to do), which one would think might be of more interest to those ostensibly preoccupied by defending the sanctity of marriage. That they are not betrays the lie, the thin façade of their deceitful justification. If there is anything sacred to be found at all in marriage, it is love—which is not bound by simple binaries.

The truth is this: Restricting marriage does not make it worth more. It makes it worth less.

Aristophanes said, in Plato's Symposium, that humankind, "judging by their neglect of it, have never, as I think, at all understood the power of Love. For if they had understood it they would surely have built noble temples and altars, and offered solemn sacrifices in its honor."

We could start, in this country, simply by repealing DOMA. The monuments can come later.

Love is neither the sole province of unions between one man and one woman, nor a luxury we should ever take for granted. It is a luxury so precious that denying of some people any and every expression of its unique and awesome qualities, treating their love as different, as less, is an affront to the tremendous gift we have been given in our capacity to feel love.

If we really understood love, we would not just build in its honor noble temples and altars, and offer solemn sacrifices, but would believe without reservation that to deny its existence in every human heart is to reject our humanity.

Happy Valentine's Day.